Please note: we have been online over ten years, and we want The Trek BBS to continue as a free site. But if you block our ads we are at risk.Please consider unblocking ads for this site - every ad you view counts and helps us pay for the bandwidth that you are using. Thank you for your understanding.

Leonard Nimoy

Welcome! The Trek BBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans. Please login to see our full range of forums as well as the ability to send and receive private messages, track your favourite topics and of course join in the discussions.

If you are a new visitor, join us for free. If you are an existing member please login below. Note: for members who joined under our old messageboard system, please login with your display name not your login name.

I see there is extensive information on connections between the novels in the Charting the Novel-verse thread, but I was wondering if there's a thread or website that that describes the contradictions between the novels?

I keep mixing up which novels, but in the early TNG-relaunch books, either Death in Winter, Resistance or Before Dishonor, there is a contradiction where Worf meets Janeway, then later claims he never has done.

The Q's backstory in the Q-Continuum trilogy is incompatible with The Eternal Tide. Kirsten Beyer admitted in a podcast that she ignored all prior Q novels when writing hers.

Cold Equations #2: Silent Weapons references Ship of the Line, an older novel contradicted quite a bit by DTI: Watching the Clock (although I should point out, SotL has some continuity issues with TNG too)

Indistinguishable From Magic is swept under the rug by Plagues of Night and completely ignored by Cold Equations. This was by editorial decree.

I should also point out that considering the immense depth and complexity of the Trek novelverse, contradictions inevitable and understandable. The writers do an amazing job keeping things largely consistent!

I haven't read The Genesis Wave books, but I reading somewhere the sex of Nurse Ogawa's child is different in them than it is in the Titan books. I'm pretty sure some of the books have included the Genesis Wave when discussion recent events, so they are part of the novelverse.

__________________
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it is not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites

I haven't read The Genesis Wave books, but I reading somewhere the sex of Nurse Ogawa's child is different in them than it is in the Titan books. I'm pretty sure some of the books have included the Genesis Wave when discussion recent events, so they are part of the novelverse.

I don't believe Ogawa's kid appears until book three - maybe just the original duology is in continuity and not the sequels?

I haven't read The Genesis Wave books, but I reading somewhere the sex of Nurse Ogawa's child is different in them than it is in the Titan books. I'm pretty sure some of the books have included the Genesis Wave when discussion recent events, so they are part of the novelverse.

I don't believe Ogawa's kid appears until book three - maybe just the original duology is in continuity and not the sequels?

Alexander's diplomatic efforts in GW book three were brought up in A Time For War, A Time for Peace as part of his qualifications to replace his father as the Ambassador to Kronos.

__________________
I hate having thoughts on the top of my head. They usually jump off and commit suicide.

The big one that still gets me is that both SCE: Aftermath (my debut) and DS9: Unity feature Keiko O'Brien telling Miles for the first time about her new job on Cardassia. I blame myself for that, because I knew there was a need to coordinate with S.D. Perry to keep our respective works straight, but I didn't have the confidence yet to ask to see a copy of Unity so I could make sure. I'm sure Marco would've caught it normally, but he was dealing with having a baby at the time. I hadn't yet learned that you need as many eyes on a project as possible to make sure you catch most of the errors.

Another one that slipped through around the same time, due to different projects having different editors, was that DS9: The Left Hand of Destiny portrayed the Klingon holy world Boreth as a barren ball of ice with no native life while the VGR Relaunch portrayed it as a world with a lush jungle preserve for Klingon hunting rituals. But I think those can be reconciled if you assume the jungle preserve is just a finite, terraformed portion of the planet with all its life forms imported from elsewhere -- that way Boreth still has no native life.

There's also a more recent discrepancy between novels' portrayals of the Rigellian (or Rigelian) species mentioned in "Journey to Babel," the one with similar anatomy to the Vulcans. Catalyst of Sorrows claims that they have Vulcanoid internal anatomy but all look human externally (presumably on the assumption that Hengist from "Wolf in the Fold" was one of them), but David Mack's novels describe Safranski, the Rigelian in President Bacco's administration, as looking like a Vulcan. (I don't remember whether Articles of the Federation claims this as well.)

__________________Christopher L. Bennett Homepage -- Site update 11/16/14 including annotations for "The Caress of a Butterfly's Wing" and overview for DTI: The Collectors

In New Frontier #13: Gods Above, Spock arrives via the Romulan Praetor's personal transport, the Bird-of-Paradise - but five or six years later at the start of Typhon Pact: Rough Beasts of Empire, Spock is still languishing in the caves beheath the Romulan capital city, having made no progress since "Unification"

There's also a more recent discrepancy between novels' portrayals of the Rigellian (or Rigelian) species mentioned in "Journey to Babel," the one with similar anatomy to the Vulcans. Catalyst of Sorrows claims that they have Vulcanoid internal anatomy but all look human externally (presumably on the assumption that Hengist from "Wolf in the Fold" was one of them), but David Mack's novels describe Safranski, the Rigelian in President Bacco's administration, as looking like a Vulcan. (I don't remember whether Articles of the Federation claims this as well.)

According to Memory Alpha and Beta, the Rigel Colonies encompass a variety of humanoid species, all of whom seem to be referred to as Rigellians (or Rigelians), including the Chelons. At this point, I think "Rigellian" is more a descriptor of origin than of species, sort of like saying someone is a "Texan" doesn't tell you anything about his or her ethnicity.

__________________
~ David Mack | "Where were you when the page was blank?" — Truman Capote

^So Safranski could actually be Vulcan by ancestry but Rigelian by nationality and culture? Maybe a third- or fourth-generation descendant of Vulcan immigrants? That would be cool. Trek too often assumes that every member of a given species is native to that species' homeworld.

__________________Christopher L. Bennett Homepage -- Site update 11/16/14 including annotations for "The Caress of a Butterfly's Wing" and overview for DTI: The Collectors

^So Safranski could actually be Vulcan by ancestry but Rigelian by nationality and culture? Maybe a third- or fourth-generation descendant of Vulcan immigrants? That would be cool. Trek too often assumes that every member of a given species is native to that species' homeworld.

One of the smaller touches I really liked to your book DTI: Forgotten History was the Tellarite Chab jav Lorg, the Federation Councillor (and later President).... from Mars. The idea that Mars has a longstanding Tellarite community was, I thought, really cool and really interesting.

^So Safranski could actually be Vulcan by ancestry but Rigelian by nationality and culture? Maybe a third- or fourth-generation descendant of Vulcan immigrants? That would be cool. Trek too often assumes that every member of a given species is native to that species' homeworld.

Like Tuvok's son being a police officer on Deneva, as a properly multicultural/-special world, in Destiny - which felt appropriate to an inner(?) world (like the mix of backgrounds in the US east coast in the 18th and early 19th centuries). I remember loving that sense of the Federation as an intermingled society in that glimpse, then being a bit dissapointed that Losing the Peace's Deneva-as-presented was firmly human in make up.

And let's not forget Susan Wright's The Best and the Brightest, whose ensemble cast included a character who belonged to an alien species called the Rex, but was born and raised on Earth and was named Bobbie Ray Jefferson.

__________________Christopher L. Bennett Homepage -- Site update 11/16/14 including annotations for "The Caress of a Butterfly's Wing" and overview for DTI: The Collectors

^So Safranski could actually be Vulcan by ancestry but Rigelian by nationality and culture? Maybe a third- or fourth-generation descendant of Vulcan immigrants? That would be cool. Trek too often assumes that every member of a given species is native to that species' homeworld.

One of the smaller touches I really liked to your book DTI: Forgotten History was the Tellarite Chab jav Lorg, the Federation Councillor (and later President).... from Mars. The idea that Mars has a longstanding Tellarite community was, I thought, really cool and really interesting.